The Great Rethink: Part II – From Service Delivery to Civic Power
By Lucy Minayo
In Part I, I identified five key questions for the sector: how to shift from service delivery to civic participation; how to collaborate without losing identity or community trust; how to support systems change at all levels; how to influence philanthropy; and how to measure institution-building rather than just project outputs. I address each as interconnected aspects of a broader institutional challenge. My argument is not to choose between service delivery and civic power, but to see service delivery as an entry point to civic agency that can drive institutional change.
What Civic Power Actually Means
Civic power is the organised capacity of citizens to understand, influence, monitor, and shape public decisions that affect their lives. It goes beyond attending meetings or signing petitions. It is about whether individuals have the knowledge, confidence, organisation, and channels to engage with power: to understand their rights, participate in decision-making, demand accountability, and challenge corruption, among other governance challenges.
This distinction is important because development practice often reduces individuals to “beneficiaries,” a term that depoliticises their relationship to power. When we frame people this way, we design programs that deliver things to them rather than build capacity with them, and the relationship between individuals and the state remains unexamined. Civic power restores this relationship by recognising individuals as the foundation of public legitimacy, not just recipients of services. This recognition has practical implications: it changes what we should be asking of every program we design or fund.
In practice, this means asking a different set of design questions from the start. Not only who we will reach and what we will deliver, but also what participants will be able to do differently as a result, with whom, and toward what. These are not just evaluation questions but important design questions that change what a program looks like before it begins. These questions could help NGOs be more considered about the role they play in communities.
The Accountability Gap NGOs Must Not Fill Permanently
It is crucial to recognise how easily NGOs can become a permanent administrative layer between citizens and the state, often by default rather than intention. The multiple roles that NGOs play in society, such as delivering services, monitoring government, and holding institutions accountable, can create confusion among the people. However, NGOs must remember that their legitimacy comes from their relationship with citizens, their commitment to rights, and the public interest, not from replacing government functions.
As noted in the first part of this series, when NGOs provide services indefinitely where public systems exist, a subtle shift occurs: citizens begin to relate to projects rather than public institutions. This reduces pressure on governments to perform. Donors may celebrate isolated successes while systemic failures persist. I have seen this pattern repeatedly, and it is neither sustainable nor democratic in the long term. The more important question is whether our work builds civic capability that will eventually make our intervention unnecessary.
A practical starting point is to audit existing programs with this question in mind. Which services are NGOs providing that a functioning public system should be providing? Which communities we serve have never been supported to engage directly with the relevant government department, health facility, or local authority? The audit itself is often revealing, surfacing conversations with government that many organisations have been deferring.
Service Delivery as Entry Point, Not Endpoint
To be clear, this is not an argument against service delivery. In crises, fragile states, or where the state is absent or hostile, service delivery is essential. The question is not whether NGOs should deliver services, but whether service delivery should define them when public institutions exist, and failures are rooted in governance, budgeting, or political choices.
The most durable interventions treat service delivery as an entry point to civic agency, not as an endpoint. NGOs providing health services, for example, are well positioned to identify gaps in public health systems, whether these are due to procurement failures, budget shortfalls, or neglect, and to help communities understand their rights and where to direct their demands. When NGOs share this knowledge with communities, this is a form of civic power.
If we are keen, we will note that interventions that succeed beyond their funding cycle include a pathway toward community ownership, government adoption, or a responsible exit. Whenever these pathways are not integrated in the design of programs and interventions, even excellent work disappears when funding ends or when resources are concentrated in ways that increase inequality between selected and unselected communities.
If we are to take anything from this reflection, it is the understanding that permanent government substitution is beyond what NGOs can sustain. NGOs can innovate and generate evidence, but cannot match the state’s fiscal, administrative, or infrastructural capacity. Once we recognise this, we clarify where our comparative advantage lies.
Concretely, this means building transition planning into program design from day one, not, as we often do, as an afterthought when funding is about to end. It means documenting what works in formats that government colleagues can use, not only in donor reports. It means identifying, early, the public official or institution that should eventually own what the NGO is currently doing and investing in that relationship throughout implementation. However, that kind of institutional thinking is difficult to sustain when organisations are structured around issues rather than systems.
From Issue Silos to Institutional Thinking
The reality is that most NGOs are organised around specific issues: health, education, gender justice, youth, climate, or governance. Thematic specialisation is good because it builds expertise and community trust, both of which are valuable. However, it can also trap organisations in silos while deeper institutional problems persist and remain unexamined.
A health-focused NGO may address the shortage of family planning commodities for years without engaging with the procurement systems that cause it. Another may provide scholarships without questioning how government funds are allocated or who is accountable when they do not reach those in need or broader education justice issues. A gender justice organisation may support survivors without tracking public funds for shelters or legal aid. In each case, the organisation addresses a symptom while the underlying cause remains unresolved.
This is not a criticism. The pressures that create thematic silos are real. Funders seek defined outcomes. Communities want tangible help. Reporting frameworks reward specificity. Yet the cumulative effect is a sector that is busy and well-intentioned, but often unable to shift the systems it works around.
The shift that needs to happen is for NGOs to connect issue expertise to the institutions, incentives, resources, and power relations that shape each issue. This does not mean abandoning thematic depth, but rather asking, alongside the immediate problem, which system perpetuates it and what must change to achieve a different outcome.
One way to begin this shift without restructuring an entire organisation is to add a standing question to program review processes: what would have to change, in policy, budget, or behaviour, for this problem to stop recurring, and is anyone in this organisation working on that? Once this shift occurs, systems change becomes tangible rather than theoretical. Consequently, the matter of scale becomes impossible to ignore.
The Scale Question Is a Public Finance Question
Scale entered NGO thinking much later, and even then, often as a funding conversation rather than a strategic one. Yet if we are honest with ourselves, we already know where scale lives in public budgets. Kenya’s national budget exceeds KSh 4 trillion. Nigeria’s exceeds tens of trillions of Naira. South Africa’s public spending exceeds R2 trillion. The exact figures reveal that the resources required to change outcomes at the population level already exist, allocated and re-allocated every year through government processes that most NGOs observe from the outside rather than engage from within.
Budgets reflect priorities. Debt reveals what future citizens must finance. Procurement shows who benefits. Audits expose where accountability breaks down. Yet the NGO sector often treats these as specialist concerns for economists and governance experts, rather than as the connective tissue linking every thematic agenda the sector values.
The lack of transparency in public debt makes this issue especially urgent. Citizens are told that finances are limited, and austerity is necessary. Yet, they rarely see how debt is contracted, for which projects, who benefits, or what the long-term effects are. Across Kenya, Zambia, Mozambique, and Ghana, communities feel the impact of these decisions: hospitals lack supplies, schools are unable to hire teachers, and households face difficult trade-offs, without realising that these outcomes result from choices made on their behalf. Helping communities make this connection is one of the most underinvested forms of civic power in the sector.
This does not require every NGO to become a public finance organisation. No. It requires every NGO to understand the budget lines relevant to its work, and to help the communities it serves understand them too. A health organisation should know what the government allocates to primary healthcare in its county or district, whether that allocation was spent, and whether communities know how to ask.
When that kind of engagement becomes deliberate and sustained, the results are not theoretical. A community health approach refined locally informs national strategy, as the Community Health Promoters model has demonstrated. A legal aid model developed by a small organisation shapes justice framework revisions, as Kenya’s National Legal Aid and Education Programme showed, drawing heavily from the work of FIDA Kenya, Kituo cha Sheria, and others who built the practice long before policy caught up. A cash transfer pilot becomes the basis for a social protection program, as Kenya’s Older Persons Cash Transfer program illustrates, shaped in part by HelpAge International’s early pilots and serving as one of the clearest examples of this trajectory on the continent. Budget advocacy redirects misallocated resources, as Bajeti Hub has consistently demonstrated. Strategic litigation achieves accountability where administrative pressure fails, as the work of Katiba Institute, KELIN, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and CEHURD across East Africa attests.
What Systems Change Looks Like in Practice
These are not exceptional stories. They are what happens when organisations stop working around systems and start working on them. None of these changes happened quickly, nor were they the work of a single organisation. They shared a common trait: a deliberate focus on the system, not just the symptom.
Systems, of course, are not only made of laws and budgets. Institutions are shaped by beliefs as much as by rules. Harmful practices become harder to sustain when community narratives shift. When marginalised groups organise and find their voice, silence is broken. Changing what people believe they can legitimately demand is a form of institutional change, and NGOs are often well positioned to support this work through their community relationships.
The most impactful work is often the least visible: interventions absorbed into public systems, adopted and funded by government, and no longer associated with an NGO. In the sector, this can feel like a loss. In my view, though, it represents the highest form of success.
What makes this possible, in my observation, is deliberate documentation and translation that capture not just what worked but also why, under what conditions, and what it would take to replicate at scale within a public system. Most organisations generate this knowledge informally. Few invest in translating it into the formats – policy briefs, budget proposals, implementation guidelines – that government counterparts can act on. That translation work is unglamorous, but it is often the difference between a successful pilot and a lasting change. And yet, even organisations that do this well rarely achieve it alone.
Organising for Collective Impact
The sector has a rarely discussed problem: its own fragmentation. Many organisations pursue similar goals, compete for the same grants, build separate systems, and produce overlapping evidence. This is understandable; the incentive structures driving fragmentation are strong, and organisational survival is a real concern. But a fragmented civil society is weaker, less able to speak collectively, sustain institutional relationships, or exert coordinated pressure over time.
The sector needs an intentional architecture of collaboration: shared systems for finance, HR, legal, and technology; joint advocacy platforms; thematic coalitions organised around institutional goals; and federated structures that allow local organisations to retain their identity while pooling capacity.
A more immediate step is for organisations working on the same issues in the same geographies to map each other, not competitively, but honestly, and identify where joint action would be more effective than parallel action. Joint community engagement, shared evidence platforms, and unified government engagement on a specific budget or policy question are all achievable without formal merger. They require trust, and trust requires investment. These ideas are not new, but they remain rare because they require honest conversations about organisational ego and survival that the sector has yet to have at scale. The alternative, a sector that fragments further as resources decline, serves no one, least of all the communities whose interests the sector exists to advance.
The sector cannot restructure itself through willpower alone, however. Much of the fragmentation results from incentive structures created by philanthropy. Philanthropy must therefore be part of this rethinking.
Philanthropy Must Fund What Lasts
Short funding cycles, project-based grants, novelty incentives, and competition-based funding have shaped organisational behaviour in ways that are now difficult to reverse. Organisations pursue proposals, repackage ideas, and prioritise visibility over continuity not by choice but because the system rewards them.
Philanthropy should fund what endures rather than what is new. Some foundations are moving toward longer-term, systems-oriented investment in coalition infrastructure, community organising, legal empowerment, public financial accountability, evidence translation, and responsible transition strategies. This includes less visible but essential elements such as shared service platforms, network secretariats, policy analysts embedded within government, and community organisers with deep local ties. These investments are difficult to attribute, hard to photograph, and rarely produce compelling annual report stories, but they often transform the institutional landscape more durably than individual programs ever could.
NGOs, for their part, have a role in shifting this dynamic by engaging funders more directly in the evidence of what lasts. This could be through bringing funders into the moments when a pilot becomes policy, when a community group successfully challenges a budget decision, or when a government adopts a model the NGO developed. These are the stories that shift funder thinking over time. The sector has been better at reporting activities than at narrating institutional change. That is a communication failure with real consequences, and it is one the sector has the power to correct.
Philanthropy committed to systems change needs to fund the underlying architecture, not just the programs built on top of it. But funding decisions follow measurement frameworks, and measurement frameworks follow what the sector has decided to value. That is where the deeper problem lives.
Measuring Power, Not Just Activity
The sector tends to measure what is easiest to count, which shapes what gets built. Trainings held, meetings attended, participants reached, and services delivered are real and important. However, they rarely indicate whether power has shifted.
If civic power is genuinely the goal, the questions need to change. Not how many were trained, but whether citizens used that knowledge to influence a decision. Not how many services were delivered, but whether public systems became more responsive. Not how many reports were produced, but whether evidence changed something: a law, a budget line, a practice, a public conversation. Not how many communities were reached, but whether excluded groups gained lasting influence over the decisions shaping their lives.
The sector’s current accountability frameworks measure the wrong things with great precision. This kind of measurement is harder and slower to replace, and less suited to annual reporting frameworks, but the shift is necessary. It requires both humility and method. Systems change rarely comes from a single organisation. It emerges from coalitions, networks, movements, journalists, communities, litigation, political opportunity, and sustained organising over time. Kenya’s 2010 constitutional reform process illustrates this precisely.
The Constitution did not emerge from a single campaign or organisation. It was the cumulative result of civic organising that stretched back to the pro-democracy struggles of the 1990s, sustained legal advocacy, deliberate public participation processes that brought ordinary Kenyans into the drafting conversation, and a civil society coalition broad enough to survive political resistance and a failed referendum. Learning to measure contribution rather than claim sole credit is part of the institutional maturity the sector needs.
A practical entry point is to add outcome tracking that follows what participants do after an intervention, not only what they received during it. Did the community health committee follow up with the county health office? Did the budget literacy training lead to a public participation submission? Did the legal empowerment session result in a complaint being filed? These are not difficult data points to collect; they are simply not the ones most reporting frameworks currently ask for. If NGOs change what they track, even within existing programs, it begins to build the evidence base for a different kind of accountability. That evidence accumulates slowly, but it accumulates.
If the sector can shift what it measures, it can shift what it builds, and what it builds over time defines what it is. That question, what NGOs are building toward, is where this argument has been heading all along.
The NGO of the Future
The NGO of the future will continue to serve, but it will not be defined solely by service delivery. It will organise, connect, challenge, litigate, monitor, generate evidence, shift narratives, follow financial flows, and support citizens in claiming public power. Each programme will be an opportunity to build civic capability. Every service gap will inform institutional accountability. Every innovation will be designed with public adoption in mind.
It will invest in the architecture that enables collective action: shared systems, common platforms, federated structures, and coalitions organised around institutional goals. It will engage philanthropy as an active partner for long-term, systems-oriented investment. It will measure success not by activity volume, but by the depth of change achieved in laws, budgets, norms, institutions, and the lived experience of those previously excluded from power.
Its role will be to occupy a demanding intermediary position: close enough to communities to understand lived realities; informed enough to engage with policy and finance; independent enough to challenge power; and collaborative enough to build enduring institutions. This is not a diminished role for civil society; it is a more demanding one.
The NGO of the future will not be judged by the number of services delivered or grants managed, but by whether it helps build societies where citizens can claim rights, public institutions respond, and power is held accountable.
That is the work of civic power, and it may be the defining work of this generation of NGOs.
(Lucy Minayo is the Co-CEO of Amplify Girls, Founder and Board Chairperson of Beyond Outrage Limited, Board Member of Last Mile 4D and Member of the Media Complaints Commission)
